The German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) occupies an interesting place at the intersection of several streams of linguistic scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century. As Professor of East-Asian languages at the University of Leipzig from 1878 to 1889 and then Professor for Sinology and General L…[Read more]

Both in terms of its content and its methodology, Pious Irreverence is a pioneering work. Weiss artfully employs all the tools of textual analysis developed over the last four decades of rabbinic scholarship and brings them to bear on TY, a largely neglected corpus. Tanhuma-Yelammedenu has never been studied as a work of theology, nor from a…[Read more]

Towards the end of his career, August Schleicher (1821–1868), the great consolidator of Indo-European historical-comparative linguistics in the mid-19th century, famously drew explicit parallels between linguistics and the new evolutionary theory of Darwinism. Based on this, it has become customary in linguistic historiography to refer to S…[Read more]

This essay uses Arnaldo Momigliano’s genealogy of antiquarianism and historiography to propose a new method for engaging the past. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) traced antiquarianism from its advent in ancient Greece and later growth in Rome to its early modern efflorescence, its usurpation by history, and its transformation…[Read more]

This article presents the results of a multidisciplinary project aimed at better understanding the impact of different digitization strategies in computational text analysis. More specifically, it describes an effort to automatically discern the authorship of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a body of uncorrected correspondence processed by HTR…[Read more]

Document contains a preliminary partially annotated bibliography of key works on Ancient Greek dialectology, originally compiled in 2015.

From the early nineteenth century up until the first half of the twentieth century, many leading scholars in the emerging field of linguistics were occupied with what would today be considered a kind of linguistic typology. The various classifications of languages they proposed were generally intertwined with speculation about the “racial” tra…[Read more]

Manuscript Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 6298 contains an as yet unexamined fragment of the second batch of the gospel glosses (EvII) from the biblical commentaries of the Canterbury School inserted as an addition in 3r of the manuscript. In this article, I describe this fragment, and I attempt to contextualize its insertion into the…[Read more]

This document provides the description and transcript of a set of liturgical fragments from the holdings of University Library in Utrecht. The fragments belong to a twelfth-century breviary, probably from St. Paul’s Abbey in Utrecht.

Besides glosses and other textual annotations, early medieval Latin manuscript commonly feature technical signs, annotation symbols and sigla that reflect readership or provide a framework for interpretation and use. The early medieval Insular book users were particularly keen on using such devices. This article maps the usage of technical signs…[Read more]

The extensive chains of excerpts from the Scriptures and other sources in two of the narratives prominent in the Virtutes apostolorum, the Acts of Peter (BHL 6663) and the Acts of Paul (BHL 6575) are studied in order to come to a clearer understanding of the origin of these Latin texts. The Virtutes apostolorum is an amalgam of textual material…[Read more]

This article explores how the ancient graphic symbol of the obelus changed from being an instrument of textual criticism to a tool of censure between c. 200 and 900.

This article discusses the use of critical signs during doctrinal debates against the background of the history of textual criticism and critical annotation from Antiquity to the Carolingian age.

The Latin quotation in the title of this article is taken from the Admonitio generalis, a key document of Charlemagne’s reforms circulated in 789. In a well-known passage, to which the title refers, Charlemagne calls for the establishment of schools and adds a set of subjects that might be interpreted as the school curriculum. The whole passage…[Read more]

This is the English summary of my dissertation Notam superponere studui: the use of technical signs in the early Middle Ages, which was defended on March 18, 2016 at Utrecht University.

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This blog post originally appeared on the website of Huygens ING (https://www.huygens.knaw.nl/marginal-scholarship-annoteren-met-behulp-van-tekens-in-plaats-van-woorden/?lang=en) on June 30, 2016. It was published both in Dutch and in English as a part of a four-part series about the Marginal Scholarship project, which was hosted by the Huygens…[Read more]

Slides accompanying a panel representing the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein project to build a digital scholarly variorum edition that updates, bridges, and intersects multiple divergent editions of Frankenstein, including the manuscript notebook drafts of 1816, the 1818, 1823, and 1831 print editions, as well as the handwritten notes in the…[Read more]

Desde inicios del siglo XX el interés por la génesis de las Soledades ha ido aparejado con la preparación de nuevas ediciones del texto gongorino. Gracias a los pioneros trabajos de Dámaso Alonso se supo que el texto de la Soledad primera que se divulgó en 1613 entre unos pocos allegados de Góngora no era idéntico al texto que don Antonio Chacón…[Read more]

C.K. Ogden (1889–1957) and I.A. Richards’ (1893–1979) The Meaning of Meaning is widely recognised as a classic text of early twentieth-century linguistic semantics and semiotics, but less well known are its links to the ‘logical atomism’ of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), one of the foundational doctrines of analytic philosophy. In this paper a det…[Read more]

Although a relatively minor project in terms of its impact on the broader international language movement, Basic English is interesting for the elaborate semiotic theory that lies behind it. The creator of Basic, Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957), is today remembered chiefly as co-author of The Meaning of Meaning, a book widely regarded as a classic o…[Read more]